X-men: first class

It will be no tragedy if X-Men: First Class doesn't make enough bucks to spawn the expected next two parts of a second trilogy. The major plus factor for failure would be the release from multi-year franchise servitude of four good actors and a director with great potential.

If a franchise extension does occur, it will in large part be the result of their efforts. When a block-buster action-adventure fantasy employs such top talents, it does improve its chances. The original trilogy gained much from using a pair of top-rank English thespians as its father-figure-superpower lead actors, Patrick Stewart (wheelchair-bound smiling goody Professor Xavier) and Ian McKellen (evil-minded metallic Magneto); former mutant buddies who were leaders of opposing mutant forces.

They've been replaced in the prequel by two younger British star talents, James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender. Their major breakthrough roles were, respectively, the fawn in the first Narnia movie, and an Irish revolutionary in Hunger. Since then, both have been busy at home and in Hollywood, McAvoy as a thinking man's Hugh Grant and Fassbender as a likely candidate to be the next James Bond. If they aren't stuck with spells in X-Men biannualquels, they could be making a few more films that better utilise their strong talents. They may need to grow into their roles. McAvoy, looking too youthful to be an alpha leader, channels Stewart's supercilious smile (without the repressed menace); Fassbender looks too much older and doesn't yet have McKellen's tone of impish nastiness.

It's also regrettable to foresee constraints on movie-making time for another fast-developing English actor, Nicholas Hoult. Outstanding as a child actor (About the Boy), teenage TV star (Skins) and Hollywood import (A Single Man), he'll be trapped for a few years in the guise of hairy Beast, just as Hugh Jackman lost time (and gained big money) as Wolverine. Sadly for the American film industry, one star talent who'll also lose chances to be cast in meatier roles is Jennifer Lawrence. Her lead role in Winter's Bone brought her more than 30 award nominations (including Oscar and Golden Globe); she's now wasted as the blue-toned Raven (aka Mystique) on Magneto's team.

Developing a well-known brand-name with an above-average track record at the box-office, the producers could afford to take risks by using such actors little-known in the US market. They saved money too by employing Michael Vaughan, a British director whose only previous major feature was Kick-Ass, a comic fantasy featuring super-powered kids. He maintains a steady pace while assembling and balancing plot contrivances that introduce the many characters, through flashbacks recording how and why the opposing forces gathered (side-stepping to eliminate uncredited Jackman's Wolverine pseudo-comically). The stage has been set, competently, for the next franchise instalments.

The sole major American player is Kevin Bacon, happily emoting as the Nazi medical experimentalist who engineered the young Magneto's inborn mutant flair for controlling metal masses. Bacon's good, but this franchise has never rivalled the ability of others to create joyfully complex villains that are Hollywood gifts to actors like Dafoe and Molina (in Spiderman) and Hackman (Superman).

Disappointingly, the movie's special effects were not too special, particularly a laughable levitated submarine and a final beach scene that looked like a flimsy tribute to Lost. There are better curtsies to cinematic cliches from Cold War and Holocaust genres to Star Trek and James Bond.

After watching the clumsy inter-mingling of X-Men fiction and actual newsreel from the Cuba missile crisis, many younger viewers may believe that mutants did save the world from nuclear disaster then.